Aspen Peak - 2017 - Issue 1 - Summer

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Shiffrin during her first
slalom run at the 2017 FIS
Ski World Championships
in St. Moritz, Switzerland,
where she won her third
consecutive slalom world
championship.
ASPENPEAK-MAGAZINE.COM 95
OPPOSITE
PAGE:
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY
ALAIN
GROSCLAUDE/AGENCE
ZOOM/GETTY
IMAGES.
THIS
PAGE:
ERICH
SPIESS/ASP/RED
BULL
The family moved to New Hampshire when Shiffrin was 7, and she fol-
lowed her brother to Burke Mountain Academy, in Vermont, a few years later.
She had taken so well to Burke and its coaches and students that once the
family moved back to Vail when she was 14, she grew depressed and unmoti-
vated. That winter term, Jeff and Eileen Shiffrin sent their daughter back to
Burke. "That was the beginning of what really helped develop me into the
skier I am today," she says.
It was also emblematic of her parents' unconditional support. Both grew
up skiing and ski racing, and fostered the same love in their children. Eileen
had taken time off from work to raise her kids and be with them day to day.
When they increasingly spent their days skiing, she inevitably started to
coach them. To this day, her mom's advice carries as much weight for Shiffrin
as anyone else's, including her roster of coaches. "She travels with me on the
World Cup circuit," she says. "And we've grown together, me as a skier and
her as a coach. She is always a couple steps ahead of me, just enough to help
me improve and to see the things that I need to do better. I have several other
coaches now, but she's the one who's been there since I was born."
Shiffrin still lives with her parents in Vail, in the house where she grew up.
Her hometown is also home base for training, between the mountain, her
local gym, and home, where she takes her daily nap. This summer is six days
a week of double sessions: a three-hour workout in the morning, followed by
lunch, rest, and another two-and-a-half-hour workout in the afternoon.
Afterward she'll spend time with her family, see her friends, watch movies.
But even in the offseason, she's usually in bed by 9 or 9:30. On-snow work
resumes in July, in New Zealand, where she'll train for several weeks, and
then again in Chile in September. From there, the start of the season is just
around the corner.
The two weeks following her win in March is the only downtime Shiffrin
will have all year. She spent her first day as overall champion skiing Aspen
Mountain, the first time she skied anything "besides the actual race hill, which
was really fun." She also had a bit of leisure time in town. "I love the vibe that
you get in Aspen," she says. "It's so cool and quaint. It's like a city but it's just
a tiny little thing." But before long, it was back to training, with Shiffrin eager
to relish in the results that would follow. "There are a million breakthroughs
you can make on any given day," she says. "I'm just super motivated by train-
ing days where I can make that big improvement that I've been trying to get
forever, whatever that might be. And I've always had the same focus, that
same kind of motivation, since I was 12 or 13. Those same things still work."
One recent fixation was "fluidity," which she tried to incorporate into her
skiing last season. "I have been known to be a little bit stiff sometimes," she
says, "and that keeps me from getting that little bit of extra speed." The best
thing to develop fluidity is being able to free ski, Shiffrin says, whether by
herself or with family or friends. But given her training schedule, that's a joy
more rare than one might expect from a skier who's on-mountain nearly 300
days a year. This year, her focus is on gaining strength and power in her turns,
and increasing her speed. "There's always something to be working on."
While her dedication to improvement is responsible for her success, it also
ends up being the lens through which she views that success. "I stopped try-
ing to understand [accomplishment] and [instead] just moved forward," she
says. "Winning never really sinks in. After every race I win, I'm on top of the
world for 15 seconds, and then it feels like, okay, I only did what I've been
training for all year and for the past 15 years. It's just what I've been practicing.
In that sense, it's not something that I should celebrate. I knew before that I
could do it if I just let myself ski the way I wanted to ski. And that's how it's been
with all of my biggest successes—less of a surprise and more of setting out to do
a job and being able to get the job done." In that way, Shiffrin celebrates her
successes in advance—in the gym, on the training course, even asleep during
her afternoon nap.
.
"I ALWAYS HELD MYSELF
TO A REALLY HIGH
STANDARD, SO IT WAS A
NATURAL COURSE TO
CONTINUE TO CLIMB TO
THE HIGHEST LEVEL."
—mikaela shiffrin